Of Everything That Makes You Hard
by smokingace
Summary: Lavi and his hands are curious things.


**Title:** Of Everything That Makes You Hard

**Fandom:** D.Gray-man

**Author:** su-dama/tempusfugit3

**Pairing:** Lavi-centric

**Rating:** PG-13 for language and angst

**Words:** 1,300

**Disclaimer:** DGM belongs to Hoshino Katsura et al.

**A/N: ** Something about Lavi and multiple calluses. It came to me while writing about sex, go figure.

**-Of Everything That Makes You Hard-**

Sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes Lavi doesn't pick up a pen and write. Sometimes when he does pick up this pen, his handwriting is off and illegible; it makes him slightly sick to the stomach.

Though there are times when he has felt nothing. (He doesn't like what's been headlining lately.)

Most of the time Lavi is able to write a beautiful scrawl that makes the Gramps in Bookman give a double-take, saying how Lavi has such light fingers for a boy.

He always understands this to mean his fingers are not of this body.

To test this theory, he flexes his knuckles and punches the next thing he sees—it isn't a wall or some very hard place. He is not stupid. His fist meets Lenalee's mattress (which he has not punched before), and even though he is not permitted within her living quarters, she accepts this with her feminine-forgiving silence and watches. He turns around to her like a man for a moment to think about what he's done.

He apologizes like he's learned to do, living here, and she smiles. Lenalee is sitting on her bed and asking if he wants to talk about it, but he's too bothered to do so, and she must have something to say anyway, she always does, she should fill the silence he's reserved by his barging in here. She combs her hair into a clip and nods that everyone thinks she talks too much or possibly feels too much for some reason and if Lavi should talk, want to talk, then Lavi should. To fill this silence that is coming back.

He barges out.

He feels as if he had once stood on water; now he has fallen in feet first to the very bottom of the sea, pushed through it like a knife by the faces he's been in this life.

--

Sometimes Lavi gets this pressing urge to write in his sleep, like it's something he must do nonstop throughout the night, and there is a doubt looming before him. When he relights the candle, there is hell to pay with his fingers: they can go on for hours over paper and leather. Papyrus is his favorite. It reminds him that there is a history separate from his, distant from him. This is a courageous leap, but not so courageous or much of a leap.

Sometimes, very secretively, very so-not-your-business, Lavi pretends to write over the paper lest he waste it. Bookman would argue. So he doesn't waste it and instead writes above it like ghost scrawl, and he sweats out the beauty and marrow of his outrage at—everything, he's just raging. He wants to talk, he wants to say something; but no.

But he can't, he won't, he can't do this until he is sure it is not a crime. He can pretend or not. It never changes, it is still here in his hands and on his lap to pin him down, and it's just his head talking about pinning him down.

The candle is too bright one night and he takes that courageous leap out of his room.

The hall is silent. He steals away to the nave and sees shadows flicker across the floor. God's Eye is watching. Into the font he puts his back against the freezing double doors of the cathedral, and he feels closer to history. It is not right, it should be made right again, he is having a panic attack. He hasn't had one since after the Ark and now must be a good time for one. His body contorts and calls for all the saints to put the spirit back into his body and then he laughs as he's contorting and swishing to the floor and breaking his tailbone and hearing all his blood pump and everything obliterate. He balls himself up and waits for sunrise. Come back, come back.

He comes back to himself.

He wonders if he'll tell Gramps. He wonders too much and gives himself a headache that seizes sinew in the back of his neck.

--

Sometimes Lavi hates, hates, hates it all on his fingers, these light fingers. They are long and callused, despite the lotions and oils he's tried. They are long and callused. If they are this way, no one may love his fingers. Who the fuck would love anyone's fingers in the first place, is what he should be asking himself. He doesn't laugh this time but brings his fingers to the light of the moon.

He knows that if he cries, Kanda will come. Kanda will come to his aid outside his door and get in his face and give him the worst look ever. This makes Lavi smile a bit.

His fingers are practically on the moon and making prints, like footprints, on the moon. He sits at the tiniest sill near Kanda's door and rests against the unmarked glass and leaves un-panicked breaths across it. Fingers are raised and leaving prints on the glass and the moon.

He sees that his knuckles are twitching, that the hand bones move in the moonlight. Lavi has to tell himself that the night will be over and he can start anew like nothing is happening to him. He is so sure of it that he studies his calluses carefully and knows every, every good and bad thing about them. They are mostly from writing like he does, and the most prominent one is on his middle finger. It has cracked a few times, but with tiny fissures, so no one may notice.

Maybe it is bad when no one notices. If they don't.

Lavi will ask Miranda tomorrow if she's around, because he won't be hunting her down, if she has anything for him, for his light, callused fingers—though not lightly callused. Not like this on the window pane, where he's pretending to dig into the glass and become apart of the moon, apart of it like it is sex. He thinks this and is interrupted.

Kanda tells him from behind that Lavi is being a nuisance to those sleeping and that he better get his ass in bed. Lavi is smiling at this, pretending he hasn't been up to being a scared child, or neurotic grown-up, or most visibly (not noticeably) a scared child. He is.

He is motioning Kanda closer with a lisp so he can tell him that he's becoming one with the moon, that this is unlike Lavi himself. Lavi is not of himself; he talks about the moon's history—

(this moon is much stronger than you and I and the only thing stronger than it is gravity that can be defied by our mere words either to come out by mouth or pen to paper, and this is when life gets interesting; nothing will stop, nothing is stopping you and I and if you have an attack on yourself no one will stop this, for we are rotating farther and farther away from our births and into a new dimension that hurts worse, so it is not only in your head)

—and Kanda listens. Then Kanda tells him that Lavi's walked past his door about ten times, and that there are bloody spots on the window.

Lavi realizes that he's been gnawing on the hard places of his fingers. He laughs at Kanda and draws him near.


End file.
